Book Report Mythologies by Roland Barthes Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Book Report Mythologies by Roland Barthes - Essay ExampleHe says that all(prenominal) the toys one commonly sees ar essentially a microcosm of the adult world (Barthes, 1972, p.53), and that for instance, a girls doll is meant to...condition her to her in store(predicate) role as mother (Barthes, 1972, p.53). If we apply this to videogames, we can immediately see that semiotics, especially as use to ideology, might shed more light on the role that games play in our globalised society. According to Barthes, cut toys be an illustration of the belief that children are a miniature reflection of adults -toys offer too practically direction - they do not allow children to engage in their own imaginative play. By providing children with bleached materials and toys are we, in turn, providing them with an artificial view of the worldMythologies is a text which is not one still plural. It contains fifty-four (only twenty-eight in the Annette Laverss English translation) short journalis tic articles on a variety of subjects. These texts were written between 1954 and 1956 for the left-wing magazine Les Lettres nouvelles and very clearly belong to Barthess priode journalistique (Calvet 1973 p.37). They all show a topicality, natural of good journalism. Because of their very topicality they provide the contemporary reader with a panorama of the events and trends that took place in the France of the 1950s. Although the texts are very much of and about their times, many still have an unsettling contemporary relevance to us today. The bulk of the fifty-four texts focus on various manifestations of mass culture, la culture de masse films, advertizing, newspapers and magazines, photographs, cars, childrens toys, popular pastimes and the like. Mythologies, however, includes an historic theoretical essay entitled Le Mythe aujourdhui (Barthes 1970 pp.193-247). In Le Mythe aujourdhui, Barthes is at the barbers and is handed a facsimile of the Paris-Match. As he sees a phot ograph of a black soldier saluting the French flag, the arrangement of dark dots on a white background, he understood it to be embedded with a signifier and a signified, constituting the idea of French imperialism and that Frances empire treats all its subjects equally. It is a retrospectively imposed where its position after the journalistic articles is also significant. This expressed not simply the chronological order in which they were written, hardly also to do more explicit some of the concerns that underpin the fifty-four essays. There is, then, a certain amount of perseveration between the both parts of Mythologies. If there is a certain amount of thematic continuity between the two parts of Mythologies then it is here, where Barthes claimed that he wanted to challenge the innocence and naturalness of cultural texts and practices. Although objects, gestures and practices have a certain utilitarian function, they are not resistant to the imposition of meaning. There is n o such thing, to take but one example, as a car which is a purely functional object devoid of connotations and resistant to the imposition of meaning. A BMW and a Citron 2CV share the same functional utility, they do essentially the same job but connote different things about their owners thrusting,